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In the course of its research and development project, EXATEL uses Open Source and Free Software solutions (also called freeware).
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So far, our developers have shared their knowledge with the open-source community through improving already existing solutions.
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Currently, the Polish telecommunications company has gone a step further. The state-owned company released its first proprietary library developed by EXATEL programmers.
Today, many companies developing original solutions utilize Open-Source software. There are many reasons behind the popularity of this type of software. Firstly, this is due to the existence of a large community that constantly works on improving already existing code and remedying or detecting bugs or vulnerabilities. Why? It is because everyone can benefit from joint effort – both private persons and large enterprises. It sometimes even happens that the same solutions are used in competing systems, and even constitute foundations for entire industrial technologies. Today, many companies use Open-Source solutions. They include such international giants as Microsoft, Google or Red Hat (information from InfoWorld, 2018) and numerous specialized enterprises – like EXATEL.
What is Open-Source software?
Open-Source solutions are a type of software with the entire source code made public. This means that everyone can thoroughly check the principle of operation of such software and whether the creator has hidden anything. This can be time-consuming, but, unlike working a Closed Source solution, it is possible.
Numerous Open-Source projects are Free Software at the same time. Owing to an appropriate license, they provide the possibility for testing, modification and further disclosure to all users. Free software is developed by a large, global community of software developers, architects, testers, analysts and many other specialists drawn from a variety of fields. Importantly, commercial companies also contribute to expanding the community – by introducing their own solutions to Open-Source resources.
Free and open-source software in EXATEL’s R&D projects
From the very start of programming work on EXATEL’S first research and development project, i.e., a Polish system called TAMA anti-DDoS, the Polish operator has eagerly been using Open-Source solutions. So far, our developers have only been supported the global community by reporting minor fixes to the public source code.
“Publishing open-source solutions allows the software to be developed by people from all over the world. Releasing our library is our contribution to the growth of this community. We also hope that interest in the solution itself will also increase. This, in turn, will enable conducting a qualitative verification of the code developed by our programmers, its further development, optimization or the creation of new mechanisms of this type” – said Piotr Dudzic, Director of the IT Department at EXATEL, who supervises the work of software developers within R&D projects.
libnetflow9 – a library dedicated for decoding data packets
The library developed by EXATEL’s programming team is used to decode packets compatible with the Netflow9 format. This enables fast and effective acquisition of meta information on the analysed network traffic. The code was written in C++17 and has a C API interface. Detailed information and the source code itself are available on GitHub: https://github.com/exatel/libnetflow9
